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Robin's last arrow

"Why do all these heroes have to die?"

The ten year old was looking through an illustrated re-telling of the legend of Robin Hood and had skipped to the end. He was staring dismayed at a drawing of a mortally wounded Robin on his deathbed and the evil nun who had knifed him rather than tend to his wounds slipping away with a malicious grin on her face.

The ten year old knew most of the story of Robin Hood from the Erroll Flynn movie but this was the first he learned the tale of how Robin dies.

It varies, of course, as legends do. The tale as I heard it when I was his age was that Robin, having lived a long and happy life with Marian after good King Richard restored his lands and his former estate, drifted back into his outlaw ways after Marian and Richard died and the crown passed once more into the hands of Richard's evil brother, John. One day he was was hurt in a fight with the sheriff's men. He found his way to a convent and asked the nuns for help.

One of the nuns was loyal to King John and under the pretense of treating him, sliced open a major vein.

The ten year old said, "Why do they all die? King Arthur dies. Robin Hood. I mean, I know why Davy Crockett has to die. He was a real person. But why does Robin Hood die?"

"That's what happens to all of us, eventually," the elderly librarian said with, I thought, more of a sense of self-reminder than a desire to help the kid understand.

"Does Ivanhoe die?" the ten year old asked. He's thinking of reading the book.

The librarian didn't know. I wasn't sure I remembered. "I don't think he does," I said.

"Maybe he dies in another book," he said. "That's what happens to the Three Musketeers, isn't it?"

"Yes," I said, "at the end of The Man in the Iron Mask."

He knows all about it. Athos dies of a broken heart when he gets the news of his son's death. D'Artagnan is killed in battle. Porthos is crushed to death in a cave-in after fighting off dozens of enemy soldiers.

The ten year old thinks that Sir Walter Scott must have written a sequel in which his fair Saxon knight dies. The novel Ivanhoe does end abruptly with the report of Richard the Lion Heart's death and the implication that life was not easy or happy for Ivanhoe after that.

"Why do they all die?"

"Maybe, " I said slowly, wondering if it was time for this lesson, "Maybe it's to explain to us why after all the good the heroes did life still stinks. They couldn't stay around long enough to finish the job."

"Three steps forward," the librarian said, "Four steps back."

The ten year old thought this over. He nodded and closed the book.

"But," I said, "You didn't read the rest of the story."

He asked me to tell it.

Here's more or less what I said.

Yes, the heroes die, but there is always someone left to tell the story. Athos and Porthos and D'Artagnan die. But Aramis lives on past the end of the book. And Bedevere is there watching when the three queens take Arthur away to Avalon. And Little John comes to find Robin and is there for the most important part.

Robin is still alive when Little John arrives. He's weak and past hope. But he has strength enough to ask Little John for a favor.

Take me to the window and hand me my bow, he says to his old friend. Let me fire one last arrow. Bury me where that arrow lands.

And that's where the story ends, I said, with that arrow in flight high over the trees, carrying with it Robin's spirit, and ours, deep, deep, back into Sherwood where the story is always still at its beginning.

Comments

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I think the most complex feelings that a "hero's" death caused me was in The Final Problem when Holmes went over Reichenbach falls with Moriarity. I actually cried when I read it (I was 10 and didn't know he was going to die)but then was also awash with deep seeded glee that this arrogant, genius was overcome in the end. That the only way he could finally beat his nemisis was to sacrifice himself in the proccess - that he was, finally, human. It also was the first time I was forced to peer into my own mortality. I, like many kids, had never really accepted that there is an end - in part because of the immortality of many of my heros. But here, the most venerable hero of all, was vanquished. It took many months but that story had a singular and profound impact on my youth.

Very nice story. I first heard Robin's death with the classic Fisher Price animated story-book and cassette tape set that my parents used to play on long car rides. Those tapes were excellent renditions and made me go back and read the "real" versions of Robin Hood, Treasure Island, Alice in Wonderland and many others.

Dumas may have killed off his Musketeers after 3 books, but his heroes rarely suffer in vain. D'artagnan dies a Marshall of France and even the Count of Monte Cristo ends on a hopeful note...

The Erroll Flynn movie is an awfully good re-telling and features the most important parts of the legend, including how Robin met Friar Tuck and Little John and how the sheriff captures him at the archery tournament and the fact that Sir Guy of Gisbourne is Robin's real rival. But it ends with Robin and Marian still young and happy.

I think the best book retelling is the one I read when I was a kid, the one by Paul Creswick, but I may think that because it's the one with N.C. Wyeth's illustrations..

I thought the movie "Robin and Marian" did a nice take on that final episode, with an interesting twist on the "evil nun" role. Of course with giants like Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn, a great moment is easy to carry off.

But some of the critics had a hissy-fit about the way James Goldman did in Robin in the 1973 film, especially one critic revered by everyone. Yet in that same year, a real legend, Willie Mays, died the athletic death that Marian was trying to prevent. I can still see the greatest player I've ever seen stumbling in the outfield during that series.

I always assumed that having the hero die was part of the purpose behind the hero legend: We are all mortal, even the greatest among us, so our only hope of immortality is to leave a story that others will find worth telling. Of course, many of the greatest Heroes -- King Arthur, Robin Hood, Siegrid, Japan's Momotaro, that guy in the New Testament -- are also rumored to be "sleeping", just out of our mortal reach, waiting for the End of Time to return for one last mission. Perhaps this ties into the widespread belief that we are reincarnated in one form or another; in the paperback version of Gilgamesh that I read in college, the Hero is turned away at the Gates of Death, having failed to retrieve his dear companion Enlil, because "It is only the nymph that sheds its skin that will become a dragonfly"...

My own first memory about the inevitability of death was reading the great naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton, who said "The only way to have a happy ending for a wild animal's life is to stop before you get there." ETS was writing for about the same age group as those reading Pyle's ROBIN HOOD. He put this comment at the end of an animal "hero tale", about a creature who has survived great tribulation and lived to form its own family and see its descendents. It struck me that he was letting his readers know there was something darker than the fairy-tale formula 'and they all lived happily ever after', and that I should be proud I was now mature enough to walk past the easy happy-talk ending.

That's an interesting story. The only Robin Hood I've ever known is the cartoon animal version from Disney. I used to love that when I was really little. Not quite as much as Peter Pan, but it was still one of my favorites. As to why all heroes must die....Well, first off, they can't always live happily ever after. Plus it's just realistic. If you went around every day helping people through brave swordfights or battles, you're bound to have enemies. It's like a disclaimer that should be in the job description:

NEEDED: Ultimate Hero
SALARY: Gratitude of the people
EXPECTAIONS: To serve and protect the people of said village. Must be willing to fight. Must be skilled in the art of swordfighting, shooting arrows, or other means of protectsion/defense. Must be kindhearted and brave.
DISCLAIMER: Death will most likely not be slow and peaceful. Be warned. Enemies will be made often and easily. Watch your back. Wounds, both small and near fatal, may be every day struggles.

It does also teach a lesson about how no one is invincible and such. But it's also just realistic. I like realistic books.... Realistic fantasy books. lol. I suppose that's slightly contradictory, but...if a man who is naught but a brave human is swordfighting to benefit only others every minute of his life, the story would realisticaly not end happily.

I ought to go find a good book or movie on Robin Hood, now, though....

There must be something in the air (maybe the end of Summer). Last night I was searching on YouTube for a clip of "Abraham, Martin and John".

But on a literary note, this discussion reminded me of the end of "The Things They Carried" where young Tim dreams of talking to the little girl who died of cancer. He asks her what it's like to be dead: "For a few seconds she was quiet. 'Well, right now,' she said, 'I'm not dead. But when I am, it's like . . . I don't know, I guess it's like being inside a book that nobody's reading.' 'A book?' I said. 'An old one. It's up on a library shelf, so you're safe and everything, but the book hasn't been checked out for a long, long time. All you can do is wait. Just hope somebody'll pick it up and start reading.'"

Interesting (and pretty ballsy) that he named the last short story in his collection "the Lives of the Dead", but though it doesn't surpass "The Dead", it's pretty moving nonetheless (particularly, as in Joyce's story, in the last paragraph, where O'Brien talks of the power of stories to take us someplace where we never die).

Ok, "what it's like to be dead" made me think of Adam Felber's new book, Schrodinger's Ball. I'm 2/3 of the way through it. It has characters dead but not yet proclaimed so, because they've not yet been observed as dead. It's a very funny book. Read the professional reviews at that Amazon link.

I was always very much with the 10-year-old on this one. Or does honesty require "have been" rather than "was"?

In fact it was at that age -- pretty sure it was in 6th grade -- that I read a book of Robin Hood tales. I don't recall the nun, who might have been left out of that version, but I remember the shot, and Little John's telling him (he being too weak to look out the window) that it was a goodly shot, when of course it wasn't. Not any fun.

And, not much later, I could read all that good stuff by Thurber about the Get-Ready Man, and the ghost running around the table at night, and he had to spoil it with The Dog Who Bit People, just too sad at the end.

I think Richard Mitchell had it right, apologies if I've quoted this before:
"Children learn what they most need to know from happy stories of the birth of kings, and grown-ups learn again and again what they most need to remember from sad stories of the death of kings."
http://www.sourcetext.com/grammarian/gift-of-fire/08.htm

Doesn't let me off the hook now, but in fact all these decades later I can enjoy Lear (cf. Get-ready Man) or Hamlet (speaking of leaving someone behind to tell the tale). Hmm, neither of those is what you call a hero, is he?